


rise in perfect light

by Razia



Category: Dark Souls I
Genre: Bittersweet Ending, Canon-Typical Angst, Gen, Speculation, exploring the lore and how some things might have worked
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:41:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21809092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Razia/pseuds/Razia
Summary: In the midst of all the tragedy, the world can never quite extinguish the tiny specks of hope that flare up—no matter how hard it tries.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 17
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	rise in perfect light

**Author's Note:**

  * For [laughingpineapple](https://archiveofourown.org/users/laughingpineapple/gifts).



> Dear laughingpineapple, I really hope you like this! It's different from what I'm used to writing, and I had fun coming up with headcanons that could fit in with canon + existing theories.
> 
> Title comes from Sarah Williams' poem, [The Old Astronomer](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Old_Astronomer).
> 
> Enjoy!

_Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light;  
I have loved the stars too truly to be fearful of the night._

Solaire falls, but he can’t see. He can’t see because the light is blinding and painful and everything he ever wanted, right here within his grasp, and why does it hurt so much? He can’t see outside the casing of organic matter and all-encompassing light around his head, but he feels as he falls to the ground, hard, on his face.

The pain from the light threatens his senses, but he can tell someone flips him over. They’re gentle—gentle like he hasn’t felt in a while, gentle in that particular way that makes the world want to chew it and spit it out.

Strong hands remove the thing around his head, and for a moment he thinks he will see rough stone and wild roots, the red haze that seems to be all around these ruins. But all he sees is the light. It’s brilliant and scorching for a long moment, white and loud. But then it seems to be ripped away by something. It wobbles, the sound reverberating in his brain, as if fighting whatever it is. Then it’s gone.

In its place, another light takes over. This one is gentler, warmer, like a caress. It paints his vision yellow and gold, sucking the pain of the white light away. He’s pretty sure he smells something fresh, like grass and wildflowers, like sunshine on smooth stone under his fingertips. Like reflections on the surface of a lake. It brings back the host of memories and sensations the white light had taken away.

That jumble of half-formed images is the last thing he sees.

Solaire doesn’t remember much of his childhood; most memories are fuzzy and faded, comprised mostly of impressions and sounds, sometimes a stray smell or sense of taste.

The only thing engraved in his mind—as clear as it can be coming from a child’s perspective—is his mother’s laughter on a hot summer afternoon, as the sun illuminated her face. He can’t quite pinpoint how young he was; it’s been such a long, long time. But he remembers being small enough to be lifted high in her arms.

She twirled him around as someone off to the side played a song. He doesn’t know who the person was or what the instrument was, or even what song was being played. All he knows is the light that shone overhead and his mother’s fiery red hair haloing her face.

This is his last memory of her.

After that, he remembers a grave. Someone screaming, throwing a bottle at the wall. Training. So much training. A man telling him to fix his stance. He doesn’t know who the man was. A father? A brother? Someone who cared, probably. Then another grave beside his mother’s. Then another.

The silent house is another strong memory. Shut windows, dusty furniture, the smell of all his memories tucked away in his bedroom. It stopped feeling like home; Astora stopped feeling like home too, and so he left.

Amidst the roads and the forests and the little abandoned house he slept in for a week, Solaire wished for a purpose. He asked the universe, the gods, the void. He didn’t realize something had answered until he got stabbed by a random bandit and left to bleed on the side of the road, only to awaken in the same place minutes later, blood starting to cool around him.

The sun shone bright that day, directly onto his face as he lay there on his back for a solid minute, trying to understand why he was alive. The knife still embedded in his heart hurt like nothing he had ever felt, but his heart still beat around the wound.

A shiver ran down his spine as he sat up and pulled the knife out.

The wound closed as if nothing had happened, but the blood and the cut on his shirt remained. He stared at the knife for a while, understanding and disbelief and some sort of slow anger warring inside him. It’s not what he asked for when he asked for a purpose, but it’s what he got anyway. If the gods were paying attention that day, they must have been laughing.

Things blur a little after that; there’s a stream, clear and cold in the summer afternoon, the sun warm on his back, blood disappearing into the water.

He remembers that was the point where he decided to wear the armor he had been lugging around. It must have belonged to someone before him. Perhaps the men in his family, those faces lost to time and curse. Ironic that he waited to have a knife in him before giving in and wearing protection, but leaving his cursed skin open to the eyes of others was dangerous.

No one needed to know what the gods thrust upon him.

Being cursed had brought many things he hadn’t expected. Having to hide his back and the sick parlor that his skin took on sometimes at least made sense, but the way his memories jumped around was an unpleasant surprise. Sometimes they vanished completely and Solaire could barely remember his own name—and then everything seemed sharper than ever, vivid colors and sounds, and he swore he could taste his mother’s cooking in those moments.

The whole undead thing didn’t really register until the first time he stripped near the base of the big, old mountain between Astora and Catarina. It was a cold morning, winter starting to settle in, and Solaire’s eyes widened when he saw how emaciated he looked under his clothes. But not just that, no no. He looked sunburnt. There was a red tint to his skin, some patches dry and cracking and painful to the touch. 

It’s not like he hadn’t ever heard of the Undead Curse, but living in far away Astora had sheltered him to the horrors of it.

He had shivered out there in the open, frozen in some sort of morbid contemplation of how things had turned for the worse. Then the clouds had shifted, slow and lazy, and the winter sun peaked between them. It warmed his skin for what felt like the first time.

It was probably in this moment that he first realized what a beautiful thing the sun was. It was always there, day after day, no matter how awful the day before had been.

In a little village in the middle of nowhere, eleven months away from Astora and everything he knew, he traded two weeks of his work as a farmer hand for an assortment of paints and a polishing kit. As he sat down to paint his crude sun, he had hoped whoever gave him the armor would forgive him eventually.

In the end it didn’t look like a masterpiece, but it was made by his own hands.

A year and a half after leaving his home—home? Or just a house? He wasn’t sure it was ever a home after his mother died, so maybe he was looking for a new one now—he stepped inside a small town in the middle of Catarina and promptly bumped into someone inside the weirdest armor he had ever seen.

The man—Siegmeyer, his name was Siegmeyer, he remembers—welcomed him with open arms and a sunny smile, helmet in one hand and the reigns of a horse on another. He couldn’t stay and welcome the visitor, but he was kind enough to point Solaire to the nearest inn, and invite him in for lunch at his home as soon as he was back from wherever he was going.

Solaire was floored; it had been some time since he had seen any kindness freely given. He hoped Siegmeyer couldn’t see his raw skin beneath his helmet.

He can’t remember exactly what happened next, between the inn’s owner finding out about his cursed state and kicking him out, and the heavy rain that settled above the town that evening.

He does remember the next day, as Siegmeyer found him sleeping on a bench and brought him to his home, where he introduced Solaire to his family. A wife and a bunch of rambunctious little children. The oldest, Sieglinde, no more than ten and already taller than her mother, looked exactly like a miniature female Sigmeyer. Solaire was welcomed into their home like one of their own, and none of them flinched when he took his helmet off to eat.

Solaire almost cried in joy and relief. Later, sitting by the fire with a pint in hand, watching the kids mock-fight with wooden swords, Siegmeyer told him how Catarina was slowly being swallowed by the curse, and how people were more and more on edge.

Siegmeyer didn’t need to say anything more when his eyes strayed to his wife and his youngest son, both paler than the rest of the family.

After a week enjoying their joyful company, Solaire left, citing purpose and the desire to move as his reasons, and they had no reason not to believe him. They didn’t need to know that seeing a happy family was painful, even as he thought they deserved every ounce of happiness they could get.

Here his memory jumps again, the usual haze of sounds and lights. But he knows he traveled north next, to Lordran, the place of origin of the curse, if the whispers were to be believed.

Stepping into Lordran territory was surprisingly obvious.

Where before he couldn’t quite pinpoint where one kingdom turned into another, Lordran had a clear boundary. A wall of fog always permeated the edge of the huge forest surrounding the southern border, and after that, if one was brave enough to enter, one would be greeted by the most glorious sun they had ever seen. It was ironic. Lordran was dying and yet, everything was brighter than ever.

Here he gets only flashes of those first few weeks. A small village. The touch of someone’s hand on his arm, the warm handshake of the tavern’s owner, the punch he got for protecting a small beggar child. He remembers, very vividly, a scream when someone saw his face, red, blistering, eyes sunken in. He was hauled to his feet and dragged away. He doesn’t know how he got to the Asylum; all he knows is that the chains were heavy and rusty, digging into his skin. Unforgiving.

Oscar’s face is a blur, but the rattling of keys is engraved deep into his mind.

Flying around in the clutches of a giant crow had been terrifying, but there was also a freedom that he had never experienced, and would probably never experience again.

He was surprised when the crow dropped him right in the middle of Lordran, away from any of the villages he had seen. The place he landed had grass so green it contrasted oddly with the grey stone and the sense of dread all around it. The sad man sitting around the bonfire knew of the prophecy, told him about the second bell and how it was all futile and ridiculous. Solaire felt the threat deep into his bones when the man looked him dead in the eye and told him about humanity.

He had felt bile rise up in his throat at the thought. Killing other people so he could, what, look good? How perverse.

But the sad, miserable man had only laughed.

Solaire’s first death was at the hands of a skeleton.

The bones rattled, moved by invisible hands as they formed the shape of a person. Solaire was too taken aback to do anything more than spit blood as one of the skeletons thrust a scimitar through his chest.

He had opened his eyes with a scream, to be greeted by soft green grass and the swaying of leaves on a tree. The warmth of the fire wasn’t enough to erase the shock and fear running through him, but he just sat there, head on his knees, feeling the sad man’s gaze on his back. All his other deaths were just as weird, and if Solaire knew the word, he might have understood he was traumatized. But alas, he didn’t, so he kept waking up in a cold sweat and berating himself for not being used to it already.

He kept his eyes on the sky, on the sun. Every morning it would rise, and every morning Solaire would rise with it, steps not faltering, search never stopping. There was a bridge, in the old part of a forgotten city where the hollows attacked him in droves. The glare of the rising sun on his face was sharp and warm in equal measure. A bright spring morning, at the base of an old, old altar, dilapidated, crumbling at the edges. He had knelt there for hours, prayers he had never known leaving his lips.

The heavy weight of a gold coin in his pocket.

Time and space breaking apart didn’t really register at first, though he would often find it odd that some days seemed twice as long, and some sunsets happened in a blink of an eye. Then he noticed a white glowing flower in Darkroot Garden, shining in its glorious full bloom... only to see the same flower a few days later, tiny and fragile and only a fraction of its full size. Amid the traitorous bushes and the forgotten knights made of stone and magic, Solaire realized time wasn’t going straight forward anymore, though it still seemed to pass one way or another, seasons and days and the growing and dying of plants—even if said plants reversed a few times.

After ringing one of the bells and roaming around for months that could very well have been years, he stumbled upon his first visitor from another world.

The encounter had been strange, but curiosity won in the end. Solaire had already seen the ghosts of people running by him, or sitting at random bonfires for hours and hours, as if stuck in a loop; but the faint glow around the pyromancer was a new thing.

He had approached with not as much caution as one should—not being able to die had its perks—and struck up a conversation. An hour later, he had said goodbye to a friend he was certain he wasn’t going to see again, but they had given him a gift. A small white stone, smooth and warm to the touch, capable of breaching the barriers between worlds for brief periods of time.

He tried it out, and it was the most fun he had had since being dragged away to the Asylum.

He took it upon himself to find more of these stones and help the novice warriors he met along the way. It was nothing short of mandatory, really, to pass forward the kindness of a stranger who had no obligation to help, but did anyway. It made him smile, hope blooming in his chest that not everything was as horrid as it seemed, that there was still generosity and compassion to be found among the crumbling of castles and the decay of life.

He found his first humanity inside a rat.

He had made it a habit of not killing if he could help it; it wasn’t any creature’s fault that they had fallen prey to the curse. But sometimes it was inevitable, and it was with a heavy heart that he had struck down two rats that had jumped at him, gaunt with hunger and desperate in the movements.

After the rats stopped moving, something had glowed from within the belly of one of them, and setting aside his disgust, Solaire had looked inside to find a small piece of... something. It was dark but shiny, moving slightly from side to side, as if alive. Solaire took it to the sad man, the only other constant he could find besides himself.

Humanity, the man had said, congratulating him with a smile that hadn’t reached his eyes.

Solaire had recoiled at that, almost dropping it. So this was humanity.

He didn’t understand how it worked, wasn’t sure he wanted to know either, but one cold, cold evening had been too much and he had caved. He crushed the humanity on a bonfire—everything always seemed to come back to a bonfire—and watched in amazement as his hands reverted to their slight rosy color, muscles filling in, nails growing and looking healthy in a way he hadn’t seen in years.

A big part of him immediately understood why humanity was so precious to the undead, and a tiny, dark part of him, one he usually ignored, wanted more.

Keeping his no-killing-unless-necessary policy was much harder after that.

He had made a few other friends over the time he stayed in Lordran, and he remembers some of them with a fondness that almost overwhelms him, even as he feels his strength fade away by the second.

There was the scholar in a big hat, obsessed with sorcery and forbidden knowledge. His harried apprentice, and the mysterious girl down in Blighttown. The talking cat and the kind lady in white clothes. A handful of prophesied undead, from different worlds and different walks of life.

The kind pyromancer with scarred hands that gave him a smile when he handed them a soapstone, that bumped into him again and again, that flirted back when Solaire uttered the most inane comments. That sat with him and listened as he blabbered about his own sun.

Most of them just wanted to survive a little longer, breathe in fresh air again, see another place besides Lordran. Some of them wanted to go back to a home that didn’t exist anymore. But some of them were walking towards a burdensome goal; a goal he wasn’t sure he wanted to follow, even as he defeated Quelaag and rang the second bell.

The serpents fought for his attention, whispering temptations and pleas and orders, but he made the utmost sure to never pay them any mind, only offering his smiles and his laughter as the distraction they were.

He bumped into Siegmeyer many times over the years.

His friend never outright said it, but Solaire saw on his face the weight of the curse taking hold, little by little. After a year, Siegmeyer stopped talking about his youngest son and his middle daughter. After three years the only ones Siegmeyer ever talked about were his wife and Sieglinde, but mostly Sieglinde. His pride and joy.

Their last conversation is burned in his mind alongside the memories that never fade, no matter how much time passes. They were sitting around the first bonfire in Anor Londo, aware of the fire keeper’s glare on their back. Siegmeyer was recounting his last adventure before stepping into Anor Londo, singing the praises of this fellow undead that had helped him on many occasions since he had found the gates to Sen’s Fortress. Solaire had smiled, wondering what were the odds that they both had somehow bumped into the same visitor from another world.

He never saw Siegmeyer again after that, but he did find Sieglinde sitting alone at the bonfire in Ash Lake, silently crying into her hands. Solaire had sat with her for a couple of hours and they reminisced about Siegmeyer and Catarina and their town’s solstice festival that was bound to start in a month. He had urged her to go back home and enjoy what she could, before the curse took other things from her too. She left with a teary smile and a promise to come back, and Solaire had somehow known he was never going to see her again.

When he stepped inside the tunnel leading to the massive door, he somehow knew time was running out for him. His sun was burning itself to an end, even while it seemed so far out of his reach.

Had he tried hard enough?

When the Chaos Bug with the burning eyes dodged his blade, Solaire knew it was over. He was aware enough to understand what was happening as his movements stilled, as white light flooded his eyes and his ears and his senses as a whole, burning burning burning, why did it burn so bad?

He fell, by the scarred hands of a friend. It was a gentler fall than he had expected.

As Solaire breathes his last breath, his body fades away like so many before him. In its place a bright, incandescent ball of light appears, floating just above the ground. It swirls around itself, tiny specks of light swimming around each other, winking in and out.

They grab the soul with care, hands ironically shaking from the effort of trying not to jostle it.

Their steps are measured as they make their way out of the tunnel, the floor littered with the carcasses of Chaos Bugs. The hot temperature forever present inside the ruins seems more suffocating than never, but they don’t falter. They pass by a dozen or so corpses along the way, demons and monsters and sad little creatures too twisted to be anything else. Some of them will be back by the time they make their way down again, but for now the path is clear.

The bonfire burns bright as they close their eyes and will their way to the surface, to the entrance of the castle. They open their eyes to dirty grey stone and the nameless statue that watches over this specific flame.

Outside the sun is high in the sky. It’s probably noon.

They lean down and slowly place Solaire’s soul at the foot of the altar. It brightens for a full second, looking like it’s going to burst, and then it starts dispersing itself. Slowly at first, then faster and faster until it winks out of existence. There’s a flash, blinding and so fast it almost seems like an illusion instead of reality, and it’s like the sun scorching the earth.

They open their eyes. The soul is gone.

The sun feels just a bit warmer and brighter for the rest of the day.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Please, leave a comment telling me what you thought ( ´ ▽ ` )ﾉ


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